Working alongside NY’s hottest chefs took its toll on Laurie Woolever, but in a new memoir she opens up about her battles with drinking, drugs – and losing her friend
Laurie Woolever is an expert on indulgence. The first time we met was in a dimly lit omakase restaurant in downtown Tokyo, in the summer of 2017. We were both in Japan on respective work trips. Woolever was researching a travel book she was writing with her boss, the chef Anthony Bourdain, and I was filming a CNN digital spin-off series from his
Parts Unknown
show. We were introduced through mutual friends in New York, where I had been living that year, and where her reputation preceded her. She was known to be private, tough, with a wickedly dry sense of humour. I was a little intimidated.
As she expertly navigated a seven-course tasting menu of wagyu beef with her chopsticks, she casually mentioned that she’d recently stopped drinking, alluding to the fact it had become out of control. I self-consciously sipped my own cold beer, picked up sweet strips of marbled meat and couldn’t help thinking how tricky giving up drinking must have been, both because of her job as the then long-term assistant to Bourdain – one of the most rock’n’roll food personalities of our time – but also being immersed in a fast-paced New York food scene where drinking to excess was the norm. What I didn’t realise until reading her new memoir,
Care and Feeding
, was that while Woolever wasn’t drinking, she was still seeking hits of illicit pleasure. A few days after our dinner, she hired a Japanese male sex worker to join her for an “erotic massage” at her hotel. A clinical act to numb the discomfort she felt, trapped in an unhappy marriage without alcohol to smooth over the cracks.
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